An Elaborate Hoax

[UPDATE] The identity of the anonymous sender has been revealed! He trusted
someone he shouldn’t have. Still deliberating on the best thing to do with this
info.

A Very Strange Email

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from an anonymous sender making
some pretty outrageous claims about The Lost Dogs Home. He wrote that they had
hired someone with slaughterhouse experience to be their new operations
manager. The “evidence” provided was a LinkedIn profile that looked potentially
fake.

A Very Strange Profile

Someone obviously spent a lot of time creating the profile but as was pointed
out to me by a Linkedin user, it’s quite possibly a fake.

Linkedin Is Not Reliable Evidence!

Anyone can say they work at LDH. It took me all of 2 minutes to update my
profile to say I was a ‘Voice of Reason’ at LDH. It’s simply not credible
evidence is it?

Linkedin is not “reliable evidence”

So What’s The Big Deal?

Truth is important! Serious claims like the ones sent to me should not be
made (or accepted) without evidence. Ideally the authenticity of that evidence
is available to be verified by anyone. That’s not possible with the Linkedin
profile I was sent. Sometimes evidence consists of the testimonial of a trusted
person. My anonymous emailer did not meet that criteria.

What’s Really Going On Here?

The person who sent me the original email was annoyed when I didn’t write
about it. I don’t know why he was going to so much trouble to get me to spread
the story. It was suggested that someone may be attempting to discredit some
animal welfare advocates. There are now a small number of Facebook accounts who
are spreading the Linkedin profile by posting it on other people’s walls (68
since Thursday).

This post is intended as a reminder that we should not believe everything we
read on the Internet. We only serve to discredit ourselves when we succumb to
intellectual laziness or worse yet, the arrogance of willful ignorance.